Tag Archives: Richard Nixon

Outside of children who are big fans of those Planes movies, nowhere in American society is a single aircraft more iconic than Air Force One. When we fly our President around, we fly him in style, in a cutting-edge jet that can survive a direct blast from a nuclear bomb and is exclusively piloted by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Okay, neither of those things are true, but Air Force One is so mythic that a decent handful of you absolutely took us for our word there.

Air Force One is an American icon, both over and underappreciated at the same time. So we decided to take a moment to sit you down (you are sitting, right?) and tell you about the history of our President’s super expensive charter jet. And since we’re feeling generous, we’ll just let you know about every Air Force One plane that has ever existed, partly because we like to be as thorough as we can when it comes to discussing presidential aircraft, but mainly because we want as many excuses to post scenes from the movie Air Force One on our site.

Ingenuity often comes from the most obvious places. People have liked meth, wolves, and oversized T-shirts for years, but it wasn’t until someone sat down and said, “Hey, let’s put three wolves on a KFC-stained T-shirt” that we collectively said, “Oh, of course” and bought a million shirts from The Mountain. We didn’t know that chocolate could be put into peanut butter, and vice versa, without a combination of divine intervention and mercy killings. So when we were told that Heroes in Action Toys made action figures of American presidents, we weren’t particularly impressed…until they clarified that the presidents were also monsters.

And we immediately wanted to buy all of them.

Yes, it seems so simple in retrospect, but it took a true genius to come up with monster versions of each American president, and it would be a disservice if we didn’t take you through each and every item on the catalog to show you how incredibly American this idea is. You’re welcome.

“Boys, get out your phallus thesaurus, we got ourselves a good old-fashioned blog fight!”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt

America Fun Fact of the Day prides itself as being an apolitical entity. Sure, we’ll rip on Jimmy Carter, but really, who gives a shit about Jimmy Carter? We also rip on Richard Nixon because we’re pretty sure he tried to coax us into the back of a van with candy one time. We don’t talk about George Bush other than to point out that, surprisingly, Dick Cheney was not one of America’s ugliest vice-presidents, and we don’t talk about Barack Obama other than to point out that motherfucker is brewing beer and that’s kind of awesome. But when actual politics come into the fold, we like to sit on the sideline. Honestly, if you belong to a particular political party, we don’t really care unless you threaten to take away our booze or say shit against America. Oh, and we have issues with PETA, but they don’t count.

Seriously, how can a protest campaign ONLY center around naked women and mutilated animals? How does that make sense?

So when it comes to strong political ideals, we don’t really get the point. The only difference between a tax cut and a tax hike is a bottle of whiskey and a drunken competitive game of skee ball. We feel the need to point out that we have no liberal agenda, and no conservative agenda, and we go so far out of our way to avoid taking sides on hot topic issues that we won’t even make jokes about abortions, since both sides react to those by throwing eggs at us, and we hate having to clean our fucking walls.

Why are we going out of the way to point out how politically neutral we are? Because we’re going to direct our editorial, American venom towards a left-wing blog. “Oh, AFFotD, that’s not cool, why would you pick on a Liberal blog? There are insane Conservative blogs all over, saying all sorts of inflammatory shit.” We know, dear reader, we understand your trepidation. But you should know what this blog is called.

We expect a lot from our Presidents. Sign this bill, kill this terrorist, take a lengthy vacation, sign this other bill, cover up that murder committed by your cousin, give a presidential pardon to a turkey on Thanksgiving, it can be quite a chore. And many American Presidents have had to find their own creative ways to let off some steam while on the job. Richard Nixon had his voyeuristic taping habits. Bill Clinton had chubby chicks. Jimmy Carter would club homeless people over the head and trap them inside the drywall of houses made for the poor.

However, there is a little known Presidential hobby that is becoming increasingly popular, and results in a lot less collateral damage than Jimmy “My Kindly Southern Disposition Hides a Sinister Past” Carter.

“Well, uh, that Biden fella is goofy looking and, uh, I believe we should make him the Vice President.”

~President Barack Obama

American Presidents run the gauntlet from “Ugly as sin” to “Your wife would bone him, let’s be honest” as far as physical attractiveness goes. But, to be President of the world’s greatest nation that only gets better when you remove the letter “e” from its name, you have to have a pretty large, healthy ego. So, for most Amrrican Presidents, there have been terrifying looking monster serving as their Vice-President. The more you think about it, the more sense it makes- much like a Bride giving her Maids of Honor ugly dresses to wear, the President wants the Vice-President to be there to make them look good. As much as her politics, rhetoric, and speeches were incredibly divisive and damaging to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, what really doomed him from the start was that he decided to choose a running mate who makes you feel sort of funny when you see how she looks in a bikini with a gun. Meanwhile, an old man and a MILF were running against a young man and the puppet from Jeff Dunham’s stand up ventriloquist bits.

Young man with a puppet running mate win every time.

It’s American to be an ugly Vice-President, and honestly, there are so few instances of non-monster-like vice presidents that those that don’t look like a child of Mothra end up having an easy ticket into the White House. Plus, we’re pretty sure that the only reason Teddy Roosevelt was a Vice-President before becoming President was that he threatened to shoot McKinley if he wasn’t made VP before pointing at his nose and saying, “That’s called foreshadowing, asshole.”

So as the representatives of the pulse of this fine nation, AFFotD is primed to run down a list of the 10 ugliest American Vice-Presidents. Because even if they achieved more power than we ever can hope to come close to, we can take solace in the fact that no one remembers their names, and they were goofy looking. Like, really goofy looking.

[editor’s note- though it’s an easy target most people can recognize, we are not putting Dick Cheney on this list, mainly because our research staff found a picture from his High School Yearbook, and the majority of our female staffers said, “Holy shit, I’d actually bang that guy.”]

“Well listen here, pardner, she was just a stripper, she had no family, she can just disappear…”

~John “Marion” Wayne

In the classic song, “A Boy Named Sue,” Johnny Cash tells the story about a boy who had been given the unfortunate first name of “Sue” by a deadbeat father who he had never met. Throughout the course of this epic piece of American music, Cash describes how the boy named Sue was forced to fight his way through school, due to the ridicule he received for his name, until he grew up to be a hardened man who could take on anyone. Little did Johnny Cash know, but he was actually describing the story of another famous American who was born with a girl’s name.

That man would be Marion Mitchell Morrison, a.k.a. John Wayne.

This is the look of a man who has had sex with women he shares the same name with

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask…hey, who’s the blonde?”

~John F. Kennedy

It is a sad but simple truth that not all of our American heroes live a full life. Some are fixed in the cosmos, shining beacons of glory, while others pass through like a shooting star, all-too-brief, but spectacular for its short time among us. And sometimes, a shooting star will see another shooting star and bone it.